MicroHorror

I visited one of those Halloween stores, one of those places that are like holes in the strip-mall all year long until October. From then they become kitschy one-stop shops for all things holiday, whether Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas. But on this occasion I was on the hunt for Halloween decorations. Wendy had asked me to pick up something “creepy.” She’s more into that stuff than I am.

A woman with some kind of European accent came from behind the checkout counter to offer her overemphatic help and guided me to the décor area. There were the usual items–police tape, foam headstones, life-size figures of deathlike characters, but what struck me were two plastic sheets hung on a wall side by side. Measuring about three feet by five, they pictured two huge spiders, bodies the size of footballs, against a plain orange background. One of them with eight outstretched legs, the other appearing perched and dormant. I felt like a kid, unable to tear my eyes away from one of the most frighteningly cool things I’d ever seen. I imagined them in our windows at home. I imagined Wendy’s reaction. It didn’t even cross my mind to look for alternatives.

“They are new,” the woman with the accent said from behind, startling me out of my trance. I hadn’t even realized she was still there. “Very popular this year,” she said.

“I imagine they are,” I concurred. “I’ll take these.” I flicked a pointed finger back and forth between the two spiders. The woman hummed satisfactorily.

“Very good,” she said.

She took a packaged set off one of the hooks to our left and set out to lead me back to the checkout. As she did, she dropped a plastic Bic lighter and it bounced and clicked against the hard warehouse floor. As I leaned down to retrieve it for her I couldn’t help but notice a nasty scar on the back of her right calf. It looked fresh, deep. She turned and caught me lingering, lighter in my fingers but eyes fixed on her leg.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” she said. “Had accident while preparing shop.”

Wendy was even more impressed than me, marveling at their realism. She began to push her point a bit far, however. Over the next couple days she swore to me that she saw them fidget or jerk slightly. Nonsense, of course. Childish attempts to freak me out, and given her sense of humor, it didn’t surprise me. But her acting was more convincing than usual, obnoxiously so, and I took none of it seriously–that is, until she tore the two sheets down from the windows.

“What did you do that for?” I demanded.

She was plainly upset, even outright terrified. She was throwing them away, she said. The spiders were moving. They were coming to life. Still pushing her joke. Still futilely trying to scare me, only now going ridiculously far. After more than an hour of contentious back-and-forth, I finally got them reinstalled. Wendy wasn’t happy about it, but maturity won out. I admit, I did wonder whether she was kidding or just losing it.

We always leave the bedroom door open when we turn in, but now she wanted it closed. She was scared, she said. More nonsense. I wouldn’t stand for it anymore. I reopened it just a crack while she was in the bathroom brushing her teeth so she wouldn’t notice. My own form of nonviolent protest. We shut off the lights, slid under the covers and kissed goodnight.

I’m awake now. It’s 3:16 a.m. I know because my head is turned toward the alarm clock, pressed against the pillow. Something sticky and firm over my skin. Overlapping layers of opaque strands. The bedroom door has been pushed wide open, and turning my eyes I can see two football-sized shadows with sinewy outgrowths moving in calculated motions. One directly above, another on the far wall. Wendy is screaming. She hadn’t been joking after all.

Celia hummed the latest Glen Miller tune as she busied herself in the orangery amongst her beloved plants. She believed that music helped their growth. The results that she achieved from her cuttings and cross-pollination experiments were certainly impressive. Gardening was her passion–everything she grew flourished–she had green fingers, her friends said.

One specimen in particular was her pride and joy: an unusual variety of Sarracenia that trapped insects in a pool of juices in its center. It was a magnificent sight–shiny, succulent leaves of green merging to red, forming a lethal funnel taking the unwary to a watery end and held there by barbs which closed over them.

In fact, she thought, it was alarmingly vigorous, far bigger than was normal, and exuded a seductive perfume which she found intoxicating–drawing her to it–willing her to look into the dark well of water at its center. Was it looking back at her? No. She was fantasizing.

Its appetite grew almost daily and she had to continually increase the food supply. Sometimes it seemed to lean towards her as if to grab the food she offered. The prey slid down into the water in the reservoir and the trap closed. There was no escape, and the plant slowly digested its meal.

Celia decided to provide bigger creatures to satisfy the ever-growing plant’s voracious appetite: the occasional mouse or even a bird which she had found in the garden. Once, as she leaned over the plant to let the meal fall, she gasped and drew back sharply. Had she imagined something moved just below the surface?

The plant grew. The water trap in the center was a dark, menacing pool and the barbs which closed over it reminded her of a trap door–one with no key.

The plant became her obsession–how big could it grow? It was her child; she was nourishing her baby. No, it was too big for that. An unwieldy adolescent. They were always hungry, she had heard.

She talked to it as if it were a pet, sat with it, leant against it, tried to satisfy its cavernous interior. Rats, rabbits, they all sank into the pool of water as the trap closed above them. One life ending to sustain another.

It was a dark, clear night and frost was forecast–early for the last day of October, she thought to herself. She had better close the fanlight in the orangery. Reaching up above the plant, she took deep breaths of the musky scent emanating from the center. It really made her feel quite light-headed. She swayed, her foot slipped and she stumbled forward. To her horror, below her was the black, smooth surface of the water in the center of the plant, and from which a sinuous tendril was snaking towards her.

As Celia’s head slipped below the surface of the pool the tendril coiled around her neck, the motion triggered the reflex movement and the sides closed together. The trap door closed.

“Did you do this?” said Jake, surveying the diagonal crack across his son’s bedroom window.

Billy shook his head.

Jake sighed. “I’ll get some glass at the weekend. For the moment I’ll just tape it up.”

Next morning there was a crack in the glass patio door, running top to bottom.

“He wasn’t home yesterday,” said Billy’s mother. “He played over at Joshua’s house all day.”

“Can you order me another piece of glass, Tom?”

“What the hell’s going on round here? You’re the fifth person to come by looking for glass today.”

Jake toured the house, checking the walls for cracks and testing floorboards.

“What are you looking for, Dad?”

“Nothing, son, just wondering about subsidence. This used to be a mining town; maybe there’s been some kind of shift, a tunnel collapse, way below.”

Billy’s already pale face blanched even more.

“I don’t know what’s got into the kids,” said Janie Watts. “Josh says they’re not planning to do trick-or-treat this year.”

Billy’s mother frowned. “I asked Billy if he wanted me to make him up an outfit, and he nearly took my head off. He’s always nagged at me to think up something for him, but not this year.”

“Perhaps they’ve grown out of it,” said Janie, draining her coffee cup. “Seems kids get more like little adults every year.”

“Maybe we should board up the windows?” said Billy anxiously, as yet another crack appeared, this time in the kitchen window.

“Maybe I should put a boot up Tom Robinson’s ass,” growled his father. “That glass should have been here days back. Some bull about lorries breaking down once they passed over the county line.”

Down in the woods, a group of young boys gathered in a clearing, their faces pale and worried.

“We never should have done that,” said Billy, kicking at a pile of dead leaves. “We’ve really stirred something up now.”

“Maybe we should go see the priest?” suggested one.

“And say what? Tell him we messed around with a Ouija board down by the entrance to the old mine? You gonna tell him that, knowing how he feels about Halloween? He’ll go way out of his tree over this.”

“It was just a game…” protested another.

“I’m going home, it’s getting dark. You coming round tonight, Billy?”

“I’ve been grounded, Josh,” he lied. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Billy thought he’d prefer to be home with his parents on Halloween.

At eleven o’clock on Halloween, the lights went out throughout the town. Some people tried to ring the power company, but the phones went down halfway through dialing.

The mild October evening turned suddenly bitter cold, and those who were out walking were dragged quickly home by their howling dogs. Inside the houses, cats paced up and down windowsills, staring out intently at the gathering mist.

On the outskirts of the town, birds fell silent as a new sound carried on the still night air, getting closer with every second that passed.

And in the distance, dim lights bobbed up and down in time to the rhythmic tramp of miners’ boots, advancing towards the town.

“Harold, get over here right this instant, mister. I’m not spending another night sleeping next to a fat old man.” Margret stood in the shallow end of the pool with her bony bird arms sticking out of the modest one-piece suit to perch on knobby hips. Stringy gray hair framed a face whose most prominent feature was a pair of eyes harder then flint set under hairless brows. She was glaring at her husband, who was as robust as she was frail.

“You know I’m not going to lose any weight; I never lose any weight. Besides, we’re in our seventies; what does it matter if I’m fat? It’s not like I get on top of you anymore.”

“Don’t be vulgar, Harold.”

Slowly Harold made his way down the ladder, lowering his girth into the pool.

“Don’t just stand there, Harold, start swimming.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’m not feeding you. What, don’t like that idea? Then get a move on, fatty, and remember, you’re not getting out until you lose some of that blubber.”

Harold rolled his eyes and started to swim slow laps around the pool under the watchful eye of the Wicked Witch of the Waist.

Thirty minutes and ten laps later Harold started toward the edge of the pool. Even Margret would have to concede that he had tried.

“Where do you think you’re going, Harold?”

“I’m tired; I’m going in.”

“Get away from that edge… Harold… do you hear me?” Margret started swimming toward him, slicing through the water with an ease he lacked. He saw her coming and kicked his tired legs faster; he had to make the edge before she got hold of him.

He felt withered talons digging into his fleshy shoulder.

“Harold, we’re not finished yet.” She took his ear between her thumb and finger, dragging him away from the edge of the pool, away from safety.

Harold was exhausted; he could barely keep his head above water. He needed to get out but she was always there, dragging him back in, keeping him from resting. Thirty-six times he had tried to climb out and thirty-six times she had used claws and teeth to keep him swimming.

“Margret…” He could barely gasp the word and got a mouth full of pool water for his trouble. “I’m… drown… please…” He was crying, salt and chlorine mixing together to burn his eyes.

“You don’t look any smaller to me, Harold.” She had been serenely treading water in the center of the pool, watching him flounder, struggling to stay afloat.

He had to get out; he was going to drown if he didn’t get out of the water. The shallow end, that was his only hope. Once his feet were under him he could use his weight against her.

Harold made a break for it, paddling as fast as his tired muscles could propel him. His shoulders were on fire and acid pumped through his veins. He was almost there, his foot just barely brushed the bottom of the pool, he could almost stand, just a few more inches.

He put a foot down on the rubber floor, the water just below his shoulder, and he sighed with relief. He had made it.

All ninety pounds of his wife slammed into his back like an Olympic shot put, bowling him over and under the surface. He came up sputtering, gasping for air, and felt her skeletal hands tangle in his hair, pulling him over backwards, dragging him back towards the deep water.

Margret lifted herself out of the pool and toweled off before going inside to make herself a light dinner. Harold floated face down in the pool, no thinner than when he got in.

Word got out in the building that four people committed suicide that morning. Bound by religious conviction, they had at first assured the other fifteen hundred or so people who sought refuge in the tower that after forty days, the unnatural rain would end and the waters would subside. “It’s happened once before,” they said. They waited patiently, and when the deadline passed, they gave it another three days. Just in case. But this morning they plunged themselves into the cold, black floodwaters, surrendering to God’s will.

Even Darien and Keith heard about it, over the building’s intercom system. As janitors, they alone had access to the forty-second floor and the view that came along with it, from the top of the tallest building in Milwaukee. The eastern windows used to overlook Lake Michigan, but the lake was gone now–replaced with this endless ocean. Only the tops of two other buildings in town remained above water, and at the current rate the sea level was rising, they would be swallowed soon enough. The skies overhead were sooty even at noon and continued to drop sheets of angry white rain, but where all that water was coming from, nobody could say.

“Hell, it must be as high as the thirtieth today,” Darien said. He flopped back into a leather chair and put his feet up on the mahogany desk. Darien and Keith had cleaned the luxurious offices on this floor thousands of times but had never had occasion to enjoy their comforts or to eat from the fully stocked executive kitchen. “Bet it’s getting pretty crowded down below.”

“Bet it is,” said Keith. Now and then some people from down below would try at the doors, knocking, pounding, but ultimately giving up; every door to forty-two was locked and barricaded from the inside.

Darien reached into his pocket, felt the weight of his big ring of keys. Jingled them slightly.

“You think we should let them in, don’t you?” Keith asked.

“Well, maybe if we did, and we all got together–there’s a lotta wood in these offices. Maybe we could build a–a lifeboat or something.”

“Or an ark?” Keith snorted. “You want to find a building taller than this one? That’ll be Chicago. You think we’d make it there in a lifeboat even if the waters were smooth?”

Darien shut up. He let the keys be.

A week or so passed. All the while, Darien and Keith amused themselves as well as they could without electricity. They played cards in the dim light, flipped through magazines left in reception areas, screwed around with a putter and a package of golf balls they found in somebody’s office. They also discovered a cache of decent cigars in a desk drawer and smoked them through in two afternoons. At night, they burned file cabinets full of now-useless papers to cook what they took from the kitchens, gorging themselves.

“If it was any of them up here,” Keith said, “and we were down there? They sure as hell wouldn’t let us in.”

One morning, they awoke to the familiar sound of outsiders trying to get in. They waited for it to go away like it always did, but today the pounding wouldn’t stop. Darien rubbed sleep from his eyes and went to the window.

“Up past thirty-nine today,” he said. “I–I can’t see any other buildings.”

Bloody knuckles continued to hammer. Thick as the doors were, they couldn’t muffle the sobbing, the ratlike shrieking and scratching on the other side.

“C’mon,” Darien said. “Maybe we should open the doors.”

Keith, sprawled out on a plush couch. “Aw, let ’em knock. Just let ’em knock.”

“Just a while longer, right? Gotta quit messin’ around. Just till the next floor goes?”

Keith stared up at the ceiling. He couldn’t bring himself to look outside anymore. “Hey, Darien? You want to get another round of golf in or what?”

Sweat drips like water from my nose and down my chin, crouched as I am and always this way, soaked with regret and sin. Like a thing of the sewer, like a thorn in the heart and always an ache of remorse. This is dread and loath is the passage of time. Simply wetter I become and more saturated the blood-soaked rag of sorrow. There is no path from this. There is no dry tomorrow, no arid smile. This is damp and fog; mildew climbs my skin like a chill and the smell is dank and musty and feral. I am feral. What I have done is feral.

I kick at a husk, a heap, the remains of what was, who was, who is no longer; no longer beautiful, no longer vibrant, no longer hopeful or alive. She is no longer dry. I have saturated her in disdain and rejection. I have baptized her with the cup of fury, poured out as she has been. Soaking and dripping she seeps like rain through a tent wall, like deionized and purified and mineralized and pasteurized spring water through a coffee filter. But more bitter this and more bitter I and the water is drowning my humanity.

It has been raining for hours. Her blood is a pale steak flowing away from me, away with my compassion and away with my desire. My sin flows away like everything goes away, stark in how vibrant it remains, diluted as it is. Everything goes away and she has gone away. I have sent her there, to the land of away. My too white teeth bite my lower lip and I spill as well. My hands, hands that tear, hands that rip, they twist in tension-laced perspiration. This is the marsh and I am the moss. Slim fingers of decay blossom between my bare and scarlet toes. I can hardly stand the smell of her anymore but worse, I can barely stand to be basted in her as I am. The rain is not hard enough, the rain is not strong enough, the rain is not acid enough. My skin is marinated in She and She is embedded within me as her fingers had been when her hands reached and pleaded. “Anything you want, please, just don’t kill me.” As if there was anything else I did want or want less. Her tears were lost in the flood that was all else.

What drove me is as unknowable as what truly starts the storm. Clouds, weighing tons in reality, float like ghosts and threats. They will pass one man and hand back his sun but when they come to me they open, they fall with their full weight and I drown, bobbing and gasping for air even as my grey flannel shirt and my now-faded jeans grasp each drop of rain and cling to me, grab at me, strangle me and I will do anything, anything at all, as long as it doesn’t kill me.

When I’m drowning in sin and regret is straining at my eyes I need to wash although I am wet. A single mother late at the store bears the burden for my constant fall, always falling and failing and wailing in torment. I am sorry. Washed in the blood of another I am swimming and there is not enough water to remove the stain.

Aunt Eleanor always had beautiful hands.

Even when her face became lined and yellowed, her throat sagged to resemble that of a turkey, and her chest was covered in tissue-thin skin that collapsed when she folded her arms, her hands remained smooth and white, her fingers long and lithe and her wrists as dainty as those of a china doll.

It was as though her hands had been grafted on years later, though sometimes I wondered whether the reality was the other way round.

She pampered them, rubbing them with cucumber or lemon, creaming them, sleeping in white cotton gloves. Sometimes when I visited I would catch her admiring them as we chatted.

Her cat, McManus, seemed to worship her hands too, taking every opportunity to insinuate himself beneath them, purring, rubbing. And watching. From his cushion on the chair opposite, he never shifted his gaze from those elegant white appendages, even when they lay completely still, folded in her lap.

When, at the age of ninety, she was admitted to hospital, I visited her often. We’d always been close, and it was painful to watch as her body began to fail her.

Her beautiful hands plucked restlessly at the cotton bedspread, occasionally wandering over towards me, as if pleading for comfort. I would seize them in my own, and it seemed to soothe her, and them, if I gently massaged them, working her expensive creams into the skin.

Even as I did so, I couldn’t help but contrast my own work-worn, freckled and rough hands with hers. There were just less than forty years between us, and yet her hands were those of a woman half my age.

When she died, Aunt Eleanor left me her house, McManus and, the will said, her hands.

The first two were welcome bequests, and whilst I thought the last was one of her little jokes, knowing how much I had admired them, I was uneasy. I took care to check, when I said goodbye to her at the funeral parlor, that her beautiful hands were still in place.

There they were, folded across her narrow chest, still, white and slender. They were, it seemed, at peace.

I moved into the house shortly after the burial, selecting a room on the eastern side of the house for my own. Though I fed and groomed McManus he didn’t want to spend time with me as he had with Aunt Eleanor, preferring to spend time crouched by the door to the bedroom where she’d slept for the last forty years of her life. I’d see him sometimes cocking his head to one side as though he were listening, or trying to figure something out.

On the night of my fiftieth birthday I’d retired to bed at midnight after eating out with friends. As I moved along the landing towards my room I passed McManus, still crouched beside Aunt Eleanor’s bedroom door, and mewling pathetically as if waiting to be let in.

I bent down to pick him up, and for once he neither spat nor struggled, just started to purr loudly. I don’t know why; it just seemed a good idea to show him that Aunt Eleanor wasn’t in the bedroom, so I quietly opened the door and went in.

The light from the landing spilled across the room and onto the bed, where, nestling on the rose-sprigged quilt, lay Aunt Eleanor’s hands.

As the light reached them, they beckoned me to move further into the room, and McManus leapt from my arms and onto the bed with a chirp of welcoming delight.

I think I must have had some kind of a blackout, for when I awoke next morning I was in my own bed, the light streaming through the window onto McManus’s furry head, which was gently butting against my hands.

Well, not my hands, of course.

I think I may move into Aunt Eleanor’s bedroom today; McManus would like that.

The only things on Mason Jansen’s mind were the water and the girl, and these in equal parts.

Amazing, he thought. He could die where he stood, or a mile from here, or ten, and he could not keep the girl from encroaching on his thoughts.

She wasn’t what he had thought she was. She had played sweet, nursed him to health when his heart betrayed him; she had him fooled. In the end, she took everything. And she had nearly killed him.

She didn’t, though. But his midnight ride into the desert to rid his mind of her might do just that. He–oblivious to the gas-low hiccupping of his truck until its final throe–had left himself surrounded by sand and dunes and waves of nothing else but thick, visible heat. It was now midday and over one hundred degrees, and he had nothing to do but walk, his body wracked with hunger and nausea, last night’s alcohol long ago absorbed, its next-day effects still strong.

He tried to walk back in the direction from which he had driven, but he had drifted. There was no road in sight; there was almost nothing.

Nothing but water. Far in the distance, or so he thought. He was not convinced, however. It could be a mirage, something else that was not what it seemed. Either way, something shimmered at the edge of his vision. If it was water, he would live; he was sure of it. If it wasn’t, but believing so pushed him further, possibly into sight of the lost road–or any road–then he would walk on, and believe that it was.

He just needed to keep the girl away. When he thought of her, he slowed down. Sometimes he stopped completely.

So he did his best. He trudged along and after some time he focused, by keeping his eyes on the water in front of him and imagining the rapture in just a mouthful of it. If only it were real.

Mason choked out a desperate, hoarse laugh when he thought again that it might not be. He would die from a trick on top of a trick, a vicious double-teaming by the girl and the desert.

As he walked on, though, he realized he was gaining ground. A mirage would sit on the horizon, teasing and always out of reach. But to this he was getting closer. His heart leapt when he finally reached the water’s edge. He had not been fooled.

The water was warm. Of course it would be; he was surprised it was not boiling in this heat. He cupped his hands and took the mouthful he’d dreamed of. It did not taste fresh but he drank anyway. Soon, his hands were not enough; he put his face to the surface; he submerged his head, his shoulders, his arms. He did not think of the girl, or the desert, or their cruelty. He came up for air and went under again. He would live.

Then the water, previously motionless, began swirling against him and a sudden suction pulled his entire body under. His heart raced; his hands clawed at the sides of the pool. They did not sink into sand, as he would have expected. Instead, he felt a sickening smoothness broken by countless rows of tiny points. These points pricked his skin and grew larger as Mason was drawn further down. Only at the end did he realize that they were teeth. His mind flashed one final time to the girl before he passed through the gullet at the bottom of this mouth. Rushing behind him and washing him down was the water that had lured him.

The desert was quiet again. The monster, though mindless, did not like being exposed to the scorching air. It began to regurgitate water into its now-empty cavity, filling it slowly. There the water would stand, still and shining in the sun, until the next time.

The boy struggles in the deep beneath the surface, beyond the dominion of worms, deeper still than the heart of most men’s graves. He feels the darkness and the cold. Jagged stones burn his flesh; open wounds bleeding, blood spilling, draining into the waters that surround him.

A circle of light floats above, but he’ll never reach it. Warm, tender light of the sun is now just a memory. But he still knows fire. His lungs feel the constant fire of invading liquid, contrasted only by the choking chill of icy water.

He calls out to the light above, his voice hollow and muffled and small. It swirls up and up, through the cylinder of crumbling rock. It reaches the surface as merely a whisper, carried through the air as a wisp to be whisked away by the lightest breeze.

Memory chokes his mind, floods his thoughts, and he gags from the terror. He remembers how it happened. He becomes transported to a time when he plays on solid ground, surrounded by the trees. Such kind, lovely trees. He dances among them, savoring the warmth of sunrays speckled across his skin.

As he twirls, lost in his game, three boys draw near. Older boys with a wicked plot brewing behind their eyes.

Clouds mask the sun and the air turns cold.

The boy runs like spooked prey, his ears and head filled with the shouts and cackles of his hunters, the cresting echoes of their voices creeping ever closer. He knows they only mean to do him harm–he’s felt the cruelty of their hands before.

Flee. Run. Faster.

The boy nears the cobblestone well and his foot catches on a wayward chunk of rock. He falls to his knees, down to solid ground. He cries out, scrambling, hands clutching at the twigs and leaves and grasses; his tears and spit pool in the dirt.

Three shapes close in around him, darkened silhouettes against the haze of the horizon. The boy rises, turns to face them. His back scrapes against the coarse rock.

The largest of the three takes him by his shoulders; an unyielding grip digs into his flesh.

The boy is lurched from his stance and pushed, held out over the lip. An icy breath rises from the depths, tickles through his hair and kisses the nape of his neck.

He struggles. He cries. His pleas are returned with mirth.

A sudden look of shock melts the oppressor’s face like weeping snow; the grip is lost.

The boy feels weightless at first, as if floating in his tube upon the river, free and careless, left to the whims of a gentle current.

Then there is the flash of impact, sharp and grinding against his skull.

Still falling, tumbling, like a broken doll of bone and flesh, tossed back and forth between the walls. Down and down that hollow tube.

He breaks the plane of water like a stone. Sinking. Down. Deep. Deeper.

His eyes flare open and his awareness falls to the cold, cold that licks and gnaws upon his flesh with a broad tongue and bitter maw. Pressure fills his chest and his lungs burn, stretched like balloons to the brink of bursting.

He sinks to the bottom, his vision consumed by utter darkness, yet he sees that he is not alone.

Another boy lay just across, down in the trenches of this well so deep. The other boy dissolves, down and down, sinking into a moldering pile of bones. His bones.

The boy screams and his voice rises to the surface–a tiny bubble breaks the crystal face of the waters.

“But I didn’t bring a bathing suit,” Angie said. She sat between Jake and Chip in Jake’s truck. She glimpsed the lake as they drove past red-leafed trees. Something about that shadowy, brownish body of water made her squirm.

“No suit needed,” Chip said.

Angie became more nervous when she saw Jake grinning. She recalled her mother’s warning: If you meet a boy at a party then you can forget about a serious relationship. Just because you’re a college freshman doesn’t give you an excuse to be foolish.

“I thought we were going into town for burgers,” Angie said as Jake steered the truck into an empty parking lot near the lake. She remembered the one date they’d had, and how he’d seemed trustworthy. The night involved dinner and a scary movie at the theater where Jake worked. The night also involved Jake’s friend Chip and his girlfriend.

“Aren’t we meeting Susan?” Angie asked. The truck had stopped, and she clutched the water bottle she’d brought.

Chip stepped onto asphalt littered with leaves. “I’m over Susan,” he said.

Jake tugged on Angie’s arm and said, “It’s ninety degrees. This is what people do when they’re hot.”

Angie reluctantly followed him out of the vehicle, still holding her bottle. “I don’t like this place,” she said as they approached the lake. She saw a pair of weather-scarred smokestacks protruding from skeletal trees.

“They tried to build a power plant here in the ’70s,” Chip said. He walked onto a stony beach. “Some workers got into a horrible accident, and the project shut down.”

“They couldn’t keep this place from being wild,” Jake said.

At the water’s edge, he pulled down his shorts. Angie blushed when she saw him in white briefs. Chip also undressed until he wore only boxers with wolf heads on them.

“Now you,” Jake told Angie.

“I’ll stay here.”

Chip entered the water. “Why so scared?” he asked. “No piranhas in here.”

Jake nodded and said, “Nor water moccasins. The only snakes are rattlesnakes, and those are on shore.”

Angie folded her arms over her dress. She imagined her mother’s opinion: Go in that water and you’ll get a lot worse than wet.

“I brought my switchblade,” Chip said. He pointed at the handle protruding from the pocket of his shorts. “We’ll protect you if anyone gives us trouble.”

Angie studied their faces. She saw no sign of malice.

You’ve got to grow up sometime, she decided. What’s the harm in swimming in your underwear?

She lifted her dress over her head, and then she gasped.

Jake and Chip now waded in the nude.

Her face crimson from embarrassment and anger, Angie marched toward the parking lot. She scolded herself for being foolish. There was a part of her that knew better. It was the part that prepped for all her tests, that listened to her mother’s every sigh, that had her fill her water bottle at the rusty fountain near the parking lot so she could make the walk to the highway.

“Where you going?” Jake called. “Skinny dipping’s not a sin.”

Angie sipped water from her bottle, and her throat instantly burned. She grew feverish, then dizzy. She turned toward the lake, and she saw that it had gone black. The smokestacks were green and undulating.

She muttered, “There are other snakes.”

The first thing Angie saw was the knife in her hand. It was splashed with red goo, and its tip glittered in the sunlight. She recognized the red as blood, and she noticed it covered her hand and wrist. Sprawled on the beach before her were Jake and Chip, their bodies showing organs through the slash marks covering their torsos.

As panic overtook her numbness, Angie saw that she held her water bottle in her other hand. It was nearly empty, and the contents were polluted with brown specks. Those specks were wild and writhing creatures, and Angie understood with horror that they were in her as well.